In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall

Re:In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall by vasco on Sunday July 28, 2019 @09:48AM (#20547505)

That is the same argument Poland throws at Germany to justify the huge amounts of coal it uses and has little plans to reduce. At some point one has to ask at what cost the growth is justifiable and if dumping the same efforts into renewable technology isn't going to pay more dividends in the future when the world has moved on

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Re:In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall by Tade0 on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:54AM (#20547849)

Polish person here.

Actually that argument was only ever used to make the miners - a very powerful group in Poland - vote for whichever political party was in charge at the moment.

The coal industry overall is not a source of growth, but a liability, costing the taxpayers around €2bln annually.

A looming energy crisis and increasing costs of emissions, finally made the current government give in, put their cronies where they wanted them and approve a lot of new offshore wind investments + create a subsidy program for solar power to the tune of €230mln.

I talked with some people from Silesia and even the miners see the writing on the wall - currently 20% of the coal used in Poland is imported, so miners as a group don't have as much leverage as they used to.

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Re:In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall by jimmaswell on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:57AM (#20547865)

It's an absurd argument. You don't need to emulate the industrial age western countries went through to develop a country now that we have better ways to do it. It's no excuse for unsustainable logging and pollution.

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Re:In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall by zaro on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:52AM (#20547838)

Definitelely! There is no need for growth anymore, there is need for quality and sustainability. But the dominant financial and economics systems we have cam work only with growth. Sowe have to keep growing all the time so that the finance industry can keep increasing numbers on paper.

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